The document discusses several R packages for data wrangling (preprocessing) tasks. It provides a table with information on popular packages like plyr, reshape2, stringr, lubridate, sqldf, dplyr, data.table, and zoo. While dplyr is commonly used, the document focuses on introducing the plyr package, which can still be useful when working with list-type data. Examples show how to use plyr functions like llply and ddply to apply operations to multiple objects or subsets of data.